WordPress 4.5 to Add oEmbed Support for Twitter Moments and Timelines

WordPress introduced oEmbed support for tweets in its 3.4 release, but recent changes to Twitter’s API requires updates to core. On May 1, Twitter will be removing the XML response format from the single Tweet oEmbed endpoint. Twitter engineer Niall Kennedy opened a ticket to change the oEmbed URL for single tweets from api.twitter.com to publish.twitter.com.

In addition to the patch Kennedy submitted with the ticket, core committer Dominik Schilling added a patch to extend the provider list to support moments and timelines from Twitter.

The update was included in this week’s WordPress 4.5 Beta 4 release. To see it in action you can take the latest beta for a test drive or check out the embedded moment and timeline links below.

This just shows how fragile the whole oEmbed idea is (as any reliance on third party services in your content really) One day it is there, the other it is gone and you get zero notification that it happened while your content remains broken.

To be fair it probably happens more with youtube videos being blocked for some reason, but the baseline assumption that twitter /FB/youtube will be around forever is funny. The whole idea of using wordpress is to control your own content. Using oEmbed says that you just don’t really care about that.